One of our faithful Moore Media Matters newsletter readers posed the following question a few months ago:
“How do you measure the success of your message? Especially when you aren't selling a product.”
This question logically follows after you've used these steps to create effective content. This is more than just employing effective SEO strategies; it's knowing if people are actually reading what you're writing, once they find your content.
Before the digital age, one way newspaper writers knew if they made a difference was if they actually changed public policy. The photo above, by Jenna Isaacson Pfueller, was part of a package of stories we worked on that showed black children were disproportionately arrested by police in Columbia, Missouri. The story was so impactful, the city created a citizen advisory board to oversee how laws were enforced there. See the full story, titled "The Color of Justice," here.
Now, content marketing strategies rely heavily on the ability to digitally monitor the impact of written words. Metrics like scroll rates, impressions and bounce rates are the new coin of the realm for content creators. It would be nice if all content created beneficial change, but we'll take what metrics we can get.
Here are my 6 Ways to Measure Content Effectiveness:
1) Likes and Impressions Reflecting Content Effectiveness
I especially like (HAR!) this metric for content that I've posted on LinkedIn, because the site lets you view where (by region) the content has been read, the general title of the reader, the metro area of the reader, and the reader's general employer size. My most-popular post on LinkedIn – “Why Hiring All 'Super Fans' is Bad for Your Organization“ – attracted nearly 2,500 impressions, yet only six “Likes.” Go figure. And most people who viewed the content live in Baltimore/Washington, D.C., which is where I’m located. I'm hoping that punching up my content, using effective SEO strategies, will land me more "Likes." That might very well be another blog topic, upon itself.
2) Time Spent on Your Content Reflects its Effectiveness
If you have access to statistics on how people interact with your content, you can look at reader behavior statistics, such as, the average time spent on your site. Dash This says two to four minutes is a good average. Because I use Wix as my web platform, I have access to tons of creepy stats about my readers. Like, what's the average time spent on DaveMooreMedia.com? Glad you asked! It's seven minutes. Another metric is the bounce rate – that's the percentage of people who leave a website after only viewing one page. A good bounce rate is 40%, according to the internets. My bounce rate is 68%, but I'm OK with that. That's because I know people are using my blog for practical tips, such as, how to write blog posts, tips on content editing, etc.
If you don't run your own website, you can still ask your web folks to produce stats on your content. The information might surprise you and help guide you toward where your readers are. If your organization isn't examining those stats, it should probably start.
3) Measure Your Audience to Gauge Content Effectiveness
Old news hounds like me know that if your publication isn't growing, it's dying. So, if you've got a newsletter, a Substack column, or even a LinkedIn profile, you're able to measure whether you're attracting more subscribers/followers. I was somewhat surprised to learn that I have more than 1,600 followers on LinkedIn. Of course, that's been more than a decade in the making. Though my Substack following is low, it's growing. At this rate, by 2090, I'll be in tall cotton.
4) Brand Recognition/Authority Building for Effective Content
Some companies can afford to do market surveys and branding promotions. And I'm sure they're fine companies. I once watched a $1 million (estimated) branding exercise by The Richards Group, for one of my former employers, and thought it was a way-overpriced Kabuki dance.
What if you don't have the $1M burning a hole in your pocket?
Write content for other platforms, or encourage other content creators to reference your content, including links to your website. That links are called “backlinks,” and to hear Wix talk about them, you would think they’re worth solid platinum. I probably should do a better job remembering to link to fellow content creators’ sites when I’m writing.
Regardless, don't discount the value of your personal/company brand.
5) Behavioral Analytics Reflect Content Effectiveness
This is a tough one – how can you measure if your content influences how someone thinks or behaves? One technical, bare-bones measure is the scroll rate (how far people scroll down into an article) of your content. To learn the average scroll depth of my blog items, I asked the Wix AI assistant to “Give me a report on the scroll depth of my blog posts.” And, voila: The average scroll depth for my blog posts was about 80% for my blog posts. The scroll depth of my blog posts ranges from 62% to 100% for the top nine posts. Not bad. User Maven says a good scroll rate is 75%.
The question of content impact seems to demand a more thoughtful answer than just scroll rates, though.
6) The 'Gut Feeling' About Content Impact
The aforementioned Dave Moore Media newsletter reader said he was in a job interview once when an interviewer asked him how he measured the impact of his content.
“It's more of a gut feeling,” is how he answered the question. He wasn't satisfied with his answer – he contacted me to explore the topic further.
While the reader-impact metrics described above superficially address his question, his “gut feeling” answer was close to the truth of how content impact really works. Sometimes, if you know your audience or your subject well enough, you just know if something's going to grow legs and be read by thousands of people. You have some inkling whether content will affect change. When I wrote my blog posts “How to Talk to a Reporter“ and “The Magnificent 7 Keys to Successfully Pitching Stories to the Media,” I knew they would be popular. That’s because there was demand for that content. How did I know? Because people around me were asking that question, and I knew some of the answers. Was I surprised that those blog posts were popular? Not at all.
When I wrote "The Color of Justice," I figured it would make some kind of impact.
Trusting Your Gut – and Experts – Until Then
It's possible that someday, data scientists will reveal that they've been measuring smartphone/tablet readers' pulse rates, pupil-dilation levels, etc., for years (which I’ve been told is already happening).
Until then, content creators must trust their instincts while using the metrics available to them for guidance. And organizations must find the right content and writers to tell their stories.
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